Scary stories to tell in the dark cast august
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark isn’t cute, and it’s legitimately scary. It looked like something akin to Are You Afraid of the Dark cute but forgettable, and certainly not scary. The previews for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark weren’t impressive. It just didn’t need so many extraneous elements. The fact that the film makes any sense, considering how disjointed the stories in the book are, is an accomplishment.
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK CAST AUGUST MOVIE
The book Scary Stories to Tell in the Darkis an anthology of short stories aimed at pre-teens, and the movie is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of it. That said, the movie manages to pull off an adaptation of very difficult source material. Likewise, Ramon’s tragic backstory may be thematically poignant, but none of it really matters when the characters are screaming and running from monsters. And, worse, it has no bearing on the plot. Instead, we get very clunky exposition about Stella’s damage, and though I feel for her, it’s not particularly noteworthy stuff. But in a slasher movie, there isn’t really enough time to dig into these characters. There was a real effort to give Stella and Ramon some background and motivation, besides survival. The film’s vague political statements will likely fly right over the heads of the movie’s target audience. Because of this, the Nixon sections feel shoehorned in. Unfortunately, the message is buried in the background, never actually playing a role in the story. This is why the film focuses so heavily on the Nixon administration.
After all, fear and hate can be the byproducts of aggressive propaganda, often fueled by greed. I enjoyed that greed was placed front and center as the main corrupting influence, rather than fear and hate. The intrigue is interesting enough to hold the audience’s attention for the 2-hour runtime, but not a second longer. Scary Stories utilizes the tried and true formula of “speak the truth, right the wrong, lift the curse” seen in movies like Paranorman and The Ring. However, they look and act young, and that gives the story an added dose of unsettling reality. Sometimes their actions and dialogue are anachronistic (I’m pretty sure nobody used “douche bag” as an insult in 1968). The teens look like teens, and they act like teens.
This brings a refreshing honesty to the film. Some of these kids just aren’t coming back. Sure, the movie goes out of its way to explain that the teens are “disappearing,” but we watch the supernatural attacks as they happen.
Meanwhile, Scary Stories, which is rated PG-13, pulls no punches when it comes to the fate of its characters. It may have a dark tone and an R rating, but it usually shies away from showing the deaths of children and teens. In the age of Stranger Things and It, age-appropriate casting may not seem like a big deal, but it’s actually very surprising. 19-year-old Michael Garza, as Ramon, also puts in an excellent performance, as do the other young actors. 17-year-old Zoe Margaret Colletti, in particular, juggles many tonally dissonant scenes, and she does so with confidence and natural charm. Thankfully, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has an excellent cast of young, relatively unknown actors. Unfortunately, these films tend to suffer from a teenage uncanny valley, with performers acting far more like adults than children. It can be hard to shoot a film on a budget when you have to work around school schedules. These casting choices often come down to the complicated logistics of casting young actors. For example, Sidney Prescott, from Scream, was written to be 17, but she was played by 23-year-old Neve Campbell. In slasher films, it is common to age the actors up from their character counterparts. She teams up with her two best friends and a handsome but mysterious drifter to unravel the mystery and stop the evil entity before it claims them all. It stars Zoe Margaret Colletti as Stella, a 17-year-old outcast, who accidentally unleashes a terrible curse on the teens of her town, causing them to disappear without a trace. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a 2019 film written by Dan and Kevin Hageman (with some involvement from Guillermo del Toro) and directed by André Øvredal.